This blog is a re-print of a piece posted in June 2013. It is re-posted in light of the recent incident at Yale wherein a black male stude...

Friday, October 28, 2011

The Polyandrous Neo-Office Wife

An article
in a recent issue of the ABA Journal may help to shed some light on how women partners
fare at larger law firms in terms of office support. The article describes how, in a survey of 142 legal
secretaries at larger law firms in 2009 conducted by Chicago-Kent law professor
Felice Batlan, not a single secretary expressed a preference for working with a
female partner.

The article detailed some of
the explanations given by survey respondents:

• “Females are harder on
their female assistants, more detail oriented, and they have to try harder to
prove themselves, so they put that on you. And they are passive aggressive
where a guy will just tell you the task and not get emotionally involved and
make it personal.”

• “I just feel that men are a
little more flexible and less emotional than women. This could be because the
female partners feel more pressure to perform.”

• “Female attorneys have a
tendency to downgrade a legal secretary.”

• “I am a female legal
secretary, but I avoid working for women because [they are] such a pain in the
ass! They are too emotional and demeaning.”

• “Female attorneys are
either mean because they're trying to be like their male counterparts or too
nice/too emotional because they can't handle the stress. Either way, their
attitude/lack of maturity somehow involves you being a punching bag.”

• Women lawyers have “an air
about them.”

According to the article, Professor Batlan
wrote that some legal secretaries indicated that they did not like working for women
because women are too independent. One respondent in the survey wrote of her
male boss: “My partner in particular tends to forget the little things. I often
find myself tailing him as he's walking out the door to a meeting going down a
list of things he may need. Oddly, I don't feel like my female attorneys need
that kind of attention.”

This last comment is a reminder that while women’s participation in the work world over
the last several decades has allowed women greater social, economic, and
sometimes even sexual autonomy, women’s move to the work world did not
always herald a decrease in dependence. Instead, there may sometimes be a displacement of
dependence. This is because women
employed in workplaces alongside men, especially male bosses, sometimes became
“office wives” to such men. The
phrase "office wife" has been common in the United States and Canada
since at least the 1930s, popularized by Faith Baldwin’s 1930 novel The
Office Wife and its 1930 movie adaptation.

The notion of the “office wife” has been rendered more gender neutral
via “office spouse” (or the addition of “cubicle hubby”). Some modern
renditions view such relationships as reciprocally beneficial for men and
women. However, many commentators have observed that notwithstanding a move
toward gender neutrality, women are still often expected to be subservient to
men in office settings. In even modern times women secretaries and assistants
are often constructed as office wives who are “deferential and ladylike” and
who act as “loyal, trustworthy and devoted” extensions of their usually male
bosses, according to Rosemary Pringle’s iconic essay “What is a Secretary?” “Office wife” is a phrase that conveys mixed notions of work, domesticity, and
sexual promise, even in some modern contexts. For instance, some relatively recent court case
have involved women claiming to have served as “office wives" to men in
workplaces; not all of the claims were by way of complaint. Even in modern times , women employees have often been expected to serve as helpmates in office settings.

Although
the notion of the “office wife” or “second wife” was apparently discounted by some survey respondents as an explanation of the phenomenon seen in Batlan’s survey since modern secretaries often work for more
than one boss, I think it may be too soon to discard the idea. Instead I fear that we could be facing neo-office wife syndrome: the office wife is not gone; she
is, as the results in the survey may suggest, still fiercely heterosexual in
her choice of boss, with the twist that she is now also sometimes polyandrous
because she has more than one husband-boss.

[Some of this discussion is drawn from
my unpublished PhD dissertation, "Sisters Underneath Their Skins," a qualitative analysis of legal discourses produced in court decisions
concerning white mothers involved in intimate relationships with black men
while seeking custody of their white children. ]

About Me

Professor Inniss is a Professor of Law at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University and recently served as the Elihu Root Visiting Professor of Women's Studies at Hamilton College. She has an AB from Princeton University, a JD from the University of California at Los Angeles, a PhD and an LLM with distinction from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. Some of her research interests are comparative race and gender and the law, property law, and critical legal rhetoric. Some of her recent research is profiled at https://www.facebook.com/ThePrincetonFugitiveSlaveJamesCollinsJohnson
References to the articles in this blog should be cited as Lolita Buckner Inniss, Ain't I a Feminist Legal Scholar Too? http://innissfls.blogspot.com/ [article title](Date).